Like many great artists before him – Van Gogh, Matisse and Monet to name a few – in 1965 Andy Warhol turned his attention to flowers for a period. Although not really fitting with the modernist art movement of the time, this was the 60s and flowers had become symbolic of the peace seeking counter-culture of …
Ben Sanders is an artist living and working in LA – you can view his super paintings and drawings on his website bensandersstudio.com. As a sideline he sells painted plant pots on Instagram aided by cacti and other succulent species. He posts a picture of each one on the photo-sharing site and the first person …
Paul Morrison’s monochromatic botanical landscapes give us a bit of everything we love. Firstly, he renders plants in a reasonably botanically accurate way, clearly taking inspiration from the shapes and patterns that plants produce. But he then shakes it all up a bit to great effect. Not only does he add some more cartoony impressionistic …
Forget Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst – where are their plants? Our favourite of the celebrated ‘Young British Artists’ that studied at London’s Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s is Gary Hume (born 1962). A painter who fairly recently (end of last year) had a retrospective with another of our favourite artists Patrick Caulfield at …
Meryl Watts (1910 – 1992) was born in East London and worked predominantly as a painter and woodcut printer. After studying at the Blackheath School of Arts under the tutelage of another eminent British colour printmaker John Edgar Platt (1886-1967), she went on to achieve success in her own right, exhibiting at both the Royal …
Last week we showed the work of an artist who uses human bodies to create portraits of plants – today it is the other way around – where portraits of people are formed of fruit, vegetables and occasionally other things. Today’s artist is a little less contemporary. The Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo was employed at the Habsburg Court in …
The composition of Dutch still life artist Joke Frima’s (b.1952) paintings, choice of plant, combined with her hyperrealistic style, give her botanical work a distinctive feel. In some of her paintings we are drawn into sweeping botanicalscapes by getting a low-down, enmeshed perspective. In other works, like her still life arrangements, she manages to evoke …
The second instalment of our two-part series of tree paintings. On Friday we showed 20 paintings by women and today it’s the men’s turn. It is interesting to note the type of tree that is chosen as subject matter, and how they handle the respective rendering of these vegetative masterpieces. 1. Lucian Freud – Acacia, …
Yesterday we looked at a 19th Century natural history artist with enduring appeal, today we focus on an outstanding modern day one. Rachel Pedder-Smith is a contemporary botanical artist who achieved acclaim for her Herbarium Specimen Painting, first exhibited at Kew Gardens in 2012. At five meters long, this large-scale watercolour montage of plant bits …
Patrick Caulfield, CBE, RA (1936 – 2005) is a celebrated UK artist, immediately recognisable for his bold, reductive, outline heavy creations of everyday objects. The critic Christopher Finch described him as a “Romantic disarmed by his own sense of irony”. He somehow managed to paint very little but portray so much. Although considered an ‘urban …